Virtualization is certainly creating a lot of buzz in the industry, but despite the technology's hefty promises of cost cutting and consolidation, the vast majority of businesses are still running on physical hardware.

Beautiful code? Well, we've all seen plenty of ugly code in our time. If we're being honest, we'd probably even admit to have written some dog-ugly code at one time or other (no doubt with every intention to refactor it later so that it's a bit less brutally repulsive). But code that's beautiful? What does that even mean?

Biofuels have been taking a bit of a bashing lately, with people suggesting that maybe they aren't so green after all. And this is not to mention the fact they could require unacceptably large amounts of cropland to produce, so driving up food prices.

I had a conversation a month or two ago with someone high up in one of the IT security companies. He was bemoaning the fact that his company's AV product had performed poorly in tests run by AV-Test.org. He was deeply suspicious of the results anyway because his company actually provides its AV engine to another company that had performed better in the test. He didn't see how that could be, unless a mistake had been made in running the tests.

How misleading was Microsoft's "Windows Vista Capable" campaign? Misleading enough for a judge to approve a federal trial. On Tuesday, a federal judge ruled that two PC buyers, Dianne Kelley and Kenneth Hansen, can proceed with a lawsuit that accuses Microsoft of deliberately deceiving the public.

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As far as the UK channel was concerned, the big story was the demise (or not) of Evesham Technology. At first, everything looked rosy with El Reg reporting that Tahir Mohsan, founder of TimeUK, was investing $22m in the company through a Dubai-based business called PCC Technology.

An aggressive spam campaign designed to ramp up the share price of a convenience store firm led to a 30 per cent increase in the volume of spam circulating across the net at its peak on Tuesday, according to net security firm Sophos.

The great problem besetting the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is, of course, how on Earth to spend its mountains of federal pork on vaguely security-related stuff. One approach is to build gear which is only tangentially about security, but which might work - for example cryogenic superconductor power lines for New York. Another plan is to build something which is silly and unlikely to ever work, but which would be handy for security forces if it did - eg, handheld chunder rayguns.

LG Electronics has created a home cinema system with enough power under the hood to ensure you could start holding screenings in your own front room. The HT902TB boasts 1000 watts of listening power and is also sleek and stylish to boot.

A briefing last week from Microsoft's Christine Heckart, the general manager of marketing for Microsoft's freshly named Mediaroom TV business, attempted to straighten out one or two misconceptions about the new name, and additional features added recently to the software.

Buffalo Technology has launched two new external hard drives, with storage capacities ranging up to 1 Terabyte. The MiniStation and DriveStation models also include a USB Turbo feature to help boost data transfer rates.

Dr Lenovo has increased the strength of medication with the latest X61 Tablet

Lenovo supplies its X series ThinkPad as a regular laptop and also as a reversible Tablet in both X60 and X61 variants, so that's four basic models, but there are so many options and variants that it's almost impossible to list them in a tidy way - but we'll give it our best shot.

News that paleoclimatologists at Paul Smith's College in New York state have found a link between sunspot activity and rain reaches us on the same day that other mathematicians at the University of Washington have uncovered a correlation between variations in the global temperature and the cycle of solar activity.

HDMI connectivity could soon be extended beyond Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Elite to other versions of the gaming platform. Online reports claim that a Microsoft representative has confirmed that HMDI will soon feature in at least one additional version of the console, potentially the Premium edition.

The UK government has formally launched the selection process which will choose a contractor to run the controversial National Identity Card scheme. Details of the "opportunity" were posted online (pdf) this afternoon.

Next week's Microsoft patch fest will include nine security updates, spanning a wide range of products. Six of them earned a rating of critical, reserved for the most severe vulnerabilities and apply to Windows, Internet Explorer and Office.

In a world where digital gremlins seem to lurk in almost every shadow, many of us feel safer using an internet security package. But for those using many Norton security products who haven't updated recently, that feeling is a false sense of security.